Comment by YuukiRey

Adding fuel to the fire. I'm extremely disappointed to see such an inflammatory article on fly.io. I wouldn't want this on my personal blog, let alone on my employers, but I guess they're fine with it.

I've been using Zed and Claude Sonnet 4 (and sometimes trying Opus) heavily over the past weeks. For small edits where I have lots of unit tests, the results were great. So great that they worry me with regards to job security. For exploring a new programming domain it was also somewhat useful. I work a lot with the Typescript compiler API right now, and it has almost no documentation. Since the AI can see into every GitHub repository out there, it's much better, and more efficient, at learning APIs based on code from other folks. On the other hand it means I don't do that job, and I am forced to rely 100% on how the AI presents the Typescript compiler API to me. Are there better methods I could use? Who knows.

Where it's abysmal is code architecture. Sometimes it's almost comical: it adds an if statement to handle one highly specific edge case in a program that only makes sense if it solves the general case. This didn't happen often thought.

The hardest part was to force it to reuse existing code from the same file. My use case is transforming a Typescript AST into a GraphQL AST. The code is one big switch statement with lots of recursive calls. The AI would often add 300 lines of code that duplicate some logic which already exists somewhere else.

In the end I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. At around 900 lines of code the AI was starting to really struggle. When I wanted to take over, I realized that I didn't have the in-depth knowledge to do so. And trying to understand the code the AI had written proved futile.

Ultimately that's on me, I should have been more diligent reviewing the dozens of 300 line of code changes the AI throws at me over the course of a day. But I wasn't, because reviewing is really, really hard. For many reasons. And AI makes it even harder.

Am I therefore nuts? I find this whole article extremely one sided. Surely, based on the sheer amount of both positive and negative press, the answer is somewhere in the middle.